Recently it was announced that the body of a Bigfoot had been found and was preserved in ice. A press conference was promised where convincing evidence would be produced, but eventually Rick Dyer, one of the people involved, admitted that it was all a rather crude hoax (the body turned out to be a costume stuffed with possum guts), but that 'nobody got hurt', so that's OK then, surely?
Today's Skepticality podcast looks at the case, and interviews Tim Farley who has created the website whatstheharm.net that documents the '3,247 people killed, 224,674 injured and over $277,416,000 in economic damages' by belief in such topics as faith healing, herbal remedies, homeopathy and even over reliance on sat nav systems. The website is an amusing, salutary and handy resource to call on the next time someone justifies their belief in a bit of woo by saying "What's the harm?".
Farley has also created skeptools - a set of internet tools for sceptics to use to utilise the power of the internet for good. One useful tip that everyone can adopt is to use the tag rel="nofollow" when linking to woo sites which stops the link from counting towards their Google page rank.
Go have a listen to the podcast and then bookmark whatstheharm.net for future reference.
1 comment:
The Bigfoot hoax was perpetrated by 2 guys from metro Atlanta. My heart nearly bursts with Georgia state pride...even better, Rick Dyer is a former GA corrections officer and the other, Matt Whitton, was a police officer on medical leave. Clayton County police (south metro Atlanta) have terminated him over this.
We are not all dangerously inbred, gap-toothed rednecks, evidence such as this to the contrary.
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